City of Brass

October 2009 Archives

City of Brass will be on a short hiatus starting today and all through next week. I am sure most of the blogsphere will not even notice, but for anyone who does actually stop by here to read what I […]

Aside from the August recess of Congress, there has been strong support for the so-called public option all along: A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded […]

This is deeply disturbing to me: Quotations from Quran start appearing on the body of a 9-month boy named Ali from Kizlyar, Dagestan, his parents claim. Birthmarks in form of Arabic scripts have been appearing on the baby’s body since […]

Take this with a heavy dose of salt, as it may more reflect wishful thinking on the part of the American Enterprise Institute (which is neocon central), but there are supposedly rumors in Tehran that Khamenei has died: Rumors that […]

No, Iraq is not a “success” – Three homemade bombs exploded without warning in the midst of crowds who had stopped to gather for evening prayers Wednesday in southern Iraq’s Shiite holy city of Karbala, and the police and government […]

Further to my friend Joshua Trevino’s previous essay on religious tolerance in Turkey, there’s a related piece in the Washington Times which also provides more detail on how state secularism is driving Christian faiths to extinction and suppressing Islamic identity […]

without any fanfare – this was not announced via press release. In an unannounced move, President Barack Obama is dispatching an additional 13,000 US troops to Afghanistan beyond the 21,000 he announced publicly in March, The Washington Post reported. The […]

This is a guest post by my friend Joshua Treviño. The American relationship with religion in public life is not as simple as the phrase “separation of church and state” implies. The American concept of liberty is deeply rooted in […]

John McCain: “I think the great danger now is a half-measure, sort of a – you know, try to please all ends of the political spectrum,” McCain told CNN chief national correspondent John King. “And, again, I have great sympathy […]

President Obama is now a Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize. There’s enough in that statement alone to drive rightwing conservatives insane. And insane they certainly are, as others are ably and gleefully documenting. The general gist of the response […]

This is the second part of my series in anticipation of the upcoming Copenhagen conference. The previous post in this series was a defense of the scientific method. So, what do I think about global warming? The consensus is a […]

Ryan Lizza has a superb profile of Larry Summers, President Obama’s brilliant economic adviser, in The New Yorker. Lizza is one of my favorite political writers and he uses the profile on Summers as a backdrop for the larger story […]

As the Copenhagen conference on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol draws near, I want to lay some meta-thoughts out about the scientific method which I think are important, as a context for my general support of the theory of […]

This is a guest post by Manas Shaikh. One of the major factors leading to the collapse of the Soviets was their bad handling of the media. Few are worse off than those whose minds are images of others- even […]

The topic of conservatism’s intellectual decline is one I’ve been talking about a lot recently; I’ve been remiss in not mentioning the recent piece on that topic in the WaPo by Steven Hayward. He makes a number of points, but […]

The Katie Couric interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a classic example of how he changes the subject away from his own controversial statements. I don’t think Ahmadinejad is a particularly evil man, just a typically corrupt and cynical […]

Proof denies faith
On Reddit, someone posted the following question: "What convinces you that the Quran is the literal Word of God?" I think this is precisely the wrong question.
The book/movie Life of Pi directly

Proud to be American, proud to be MuslimThis is a guest post by Safiya Dahodwala.
Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin TUS graced the land of America for the first time as the 53rd Dai (spiritual leader) of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community. It has been nearly a decade since his predecessor, Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin bestowed his bountiful bl

is ISIS Islamic? Wrong question.There is an excellent longform essay on ISIS published in The Atlantic, "What does ISIS Really Want?" that lays out an excellent case fore ISIS being genuinely different in ideology, motivation and ethos than Al Qaeda. The real question boils down to, is ISIS "Islamic" or not - and makes an excellen

The Price of ExtremismThis is a guest post by Durriya Badani.
The execution style murder of three young North Carolina students, two of whom were hijab wearing Muslim women, raises questions regarding the rise of Islamaphobia in the United States in the form of hate crimes. Some will argue that the motive for the inc

About City of Brass

City of Brass by Aziz Poonawalla approaches issues from the perspective of a Muslim of the West. Aziz, a member of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community, has been blogging since early 2003 and co-founded the Brass Crescent Awards for the muslim blogsphere.